We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...

As a group, market forecasters are egregiously overconfident. In conformity to the dynamic model of overconfidence of Gervais and Odean (2001), successful forecasters become more overconfident. What’s more, more experienced forecasters have learned to be overconfident,ʺ and hence are more...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit untersuchen wir die Eignung der ifo-Geschäftserwartungen und der ZEW-Konjunkturerwartungen als Frühindikatoren für die deutsche Industrieproduktion. Anhand von Granger-Kausalitätstests wird gezeigt, dass die auf Umfragen unter Finanzanalysten basierenden...

We analyze four economic sentiment indicators for the German economy regarding their ability to forecast economic activity. Using cross correlations and Granger causality tests we find that the ifo business expectations (ifo), the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the ZEW Indicator of Economic...

The aim of this study is the analysis of so called socially responsible investments (SRI). First, the performance of SRI equity investment funds and equity indices is investigated using Jensen's alpha as performance measure. The analysis considers market timing strategies of the fund management...